Augmented Syntax Diagrams - News and history

Copyright 2004-2015 James A. Mason

2015 Mar 27 update: An updated version of ASDEditor has been
installed to correct an error in dragging the handles of
network edges. That error showed up in the transition to
Java 7 and 8 from Java 4. See Software to download the
new version of asddigraphs.jar .

2015 Jan 1 update: The tools at this site are being updated
to use new features of Java 8, with NetBeans 8.0.1 as the
development environment. The first updates to be addressed are
(1) new versions of the classes for representing digraphs, making
the source code more concise and the execution faster by using Java
8 streams, and (2) an updated version of ASDEditor to fix an error
in its interface that has showed up in the transition from older
versions of Java to Java 7 and 8.

2012 Sept 4 update:CardWorld2 -- an
extension of CardWorld1a to permit pointing to several cards or
piles for one command and to permit reference to cards by
descriptive adjectives for suit, rank, and color,
among others.

2010 Aug 20 update: ASDDecider and CardWorld1a --
using a decision network represented by an ASD grammar to replace
complicated if ... else logic. Breakthrough:
Augmented Syntax Diagrams can now be used to represent decision networks as well as grammars!

2010 June 8 update: Further
notes about CardWorld --
why CardWorld is an almost ideal testbed for modeling how
natural-language understanding works.

The 2008 Mar 12 update includes a
slightly expanded ASDParser
algorithm overview, including a brief discussion of the
feature-value mechanism for use by semantic action and semantic
value augmentations of an ASD grammar.

The 2008 Jan 17 update includes a release of additional
source code licensed under the Apache 2.0
license for open-source software. Specifically, this
includes the source code for the packages asd and digraphs,
the class files for which are contained in release 1.15 of the asddigraphs archive files, as
well as the source code for various utility programs whose class
files are also included in the asddigraphs archive files. See
Software for details of what is
included in the asddigraphs archive. See also the notes under
the subheading ApacheLicensedSourceCode in the bullet list
below. Thanks to Roxanne Parent for help in finding an
appropriate open-source license for this project.

The 2007 Sep 10 update includes
new asddigraphs files on
the Software page (see also below)
that contain a slightly revised version (1.09a) of ASDEditor to
implement a minor bug fix. The Release notes for release 1.15 contain
a description of the bug.

2006 Jan 9 update:

A new version (1.09) of ASDEditor
is included in an update of the asddigraphs
archive. It provides users the choice of saving grammar
files in a form either optimized or not optimized for
parsing. See the Software
page for downloadable files containing the asddigraphs archive,
and see release114.txt for more
details of the new version of ASDEditor.

The Evaluator application described in the 2005 Aug 22 update
notes just below is now available as an applet that can be run
from a Java enabled web browser running JRE 1.5 or higher:
Evaluator
. Thanks again to Roxanne Parent for creating this
applet. (Note: The Evaluator applet window must be
closed by using the Action Exit menu option, not by clicking on
the button in the upper right-hand corner of the window.)

2005 Aug 22 update:

A new version (1.07) of ASDParser
is included in an update of the asddigraphs
archive. This corrects an error in previous versions of
ASDParser that resulted in its mishandling semantic features in
rare circumstances. See the Software
page for downloadable files containing the asddigraphs archive.

An example grammar, expression.grm, is provided for
arithmetic expressions like 2.5x[100. - (.3 + 27 / (4-1))] along with
an example application, Evaluator.java, which uses the
example grammar to parse such expressions. Evaluator
also uses semantic functions corresponding to nodes in the
grammar to compute the numerical values of such
expressions. Note: Evaluator is defined to be in a
Java package named arithmetic. The grammar file
expression.grm
should be in the subdirectory from whichEvaluator
is run. Follow this
link for more details.

2005 Apr 20 update:
A SemanticValue
class
hierarchy has been added to the examples available from this
site. It includes some general classes in Java for
representing semantic values of natural-language words and
phrases, and some demonstration subclasses of them which represent
semantic values of particular kinds of words and phrases in
English. These extend parts of the npX grammar example (see
the Examples page) to provide
meaning representations for phrases parsed with the revised
grammar, npXdemo.grm
. Follow the link at the beginning of this paragraph for
more details. Once again, I want to thank Roxanne Parent for
her feedback on the new class hierarchy.